Carney’s Cycles formed because our young people wanted to join a cycling meet up, but lacked the bikes to be able to. So we asked our community to donate bikes and brought in bike mechanics who repaired the bikes with our young people. Following their hard work, the young people were then allowed to keep the bike they had fixed. Over 80 bikes were given out to disadvantaged young people who could not otherwise afford to buy a bike.

At these workshops we noticed was that many young people who were not in education, employment or training (NEET) and/or are neurodiverse, showed a real interest in learning to fix the bikes, even if they were harder to engage in other activities we offered such as boxing. Because of the success of this pilot we set up a long term project, the young people curated the name, logo and branding and built it from scratch with support from staff, now running for one three-hour session per week. We aim to get every child joining the workshop to learn the basic skills for bike maintenance and repair (e.g. fixing brakes and gears), at the end of a 6 week course of sessions. As with all of our work we are open to all young people, but target the hardest to reach young people, those who have been excluded from school, have adverse childhood experiences, lived in care, have a criminal conviction, experience poverty, experienced domestic abuse, have a disability or are neurodiverse.

If you are interested in coming to or referring a young person to our weekly bike workshop sessions, find more information here.